Windows Remote Management is a core technology for the remote management and configuration of Windows machines. WinRM is essential for automating complex Azure and AWS tasks. This guide will outline how to establish WinRM using SSH and a self-signed certificate. A certificate issued from a Certificate Authority would be preferable but for the purpose of establishing a test environment, the steps below are enough to get the technology working.

The ability to invoke Lamda functions via REST based web API is incredibly powerful. As the API gateway is relatively new functionality, the documentation surrounding REST requests and PowerShell is sparse with official documentation sometimes confusing and appearing to be contradictory.

The attached PowerShell routine can be used to make signed GET and POST requests to an API advertised Lambda script.

To demonstrate how powerful the IIS Odata extension for PowerShell is, I’ve tweaked the SSH PowerShell module that I published previously for use with Azure Pack. By doing so, as long as I can connect to my Windows IIS web server, I can relay SSH commands from any other physical environment.

For a long time now, Windows Server has come with a feature called the “Management OData IIS Server Extension”. As technology increasingly moves toward cloud computing and Microsoft technology is congealing around PowerShell, the power of this little known feature could hardly be overstated. Built-in to Windows is the ability to run any PowerShell module remotely via a REST / ODATA API call.

Service Management Automation is young enough to have a number of quirks that can be frustrating to get around. One surprising quirk has been with SMA Module Activity Data (i.e. functions) to not appear on all machines consistently.

Microsoft’s Web Platform installer provides the ability of installing web based components onto Windows Platforms. The technology is simple to use and works well when a machine has access to the internet. When the machine being installed don’t have access to the internet the installer becomes a problem.